I worked for a company that had enough customers that AWS had to rearrange their backlog for cert management to get us to come on board, and our ingress didn’t see 10,000 req/s. We put a KV store in front of practically all of our backend services though. We could have used Redis, but memcached was so stable and simple that we just manually sharded by service. We flew too close to the sun trying to make the miss rate in one of the stores a little lower and got bit by OOMKiller.

By the time it was clear we would have been better off with Redis’ sharding solution the team was comfortable with the devil they knew.